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Wednesday, December 19, 2012

You can never predict what the American Taliban will say, or put too print. I have heard many outlandish and absurd things from these troglodytes, but the prattle below even baffles me. There is actually someone more stupid than Megan McArdle, now enters Charlotte Allen.

If there were fewer women and more “male aggression” in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.

National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting:”

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Where to begin on this one? First, contrary to what Allen wrote, there was a male custodian on campus. According to NBC News, he acted heroically. And presumably, he did not just “heave his bucket” at the knees of a heavily armed killer.

Second, women can’t throw buckets? Really? And as an aside to that: Does Allen really believe that a bucket is any kind of match for a semiautomatic weapon? The absurdity of this tea baggers statement is asinine, and her intelligence quota is breathtakingly mind numbing!

Third, Allen seems to forget that in numerous other mass shootings—Aurora, Colo., in July, Tucson, Ariz., last year and at Virginia Tech in 2007, to name a few—men were also present. So it’s not just women and small children who are “sitting ducks for mass murderers” as Allen says, it’s everyone.

Moreover, as The Nation’s Jessica Valenti points out, Allen’s article is completely disrespectful to the bravery the female Sandy Hook staffers exhibited to save the lives of their students.

To lesson the bravery of these women with callous disingenuous vernacular, is both repulsive and disgusting - and as unfortunate as it is, it is the American Taliban the we have come to know all to well.